When Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, took office in 2006, he promised to govern on behalf of the country’s long-downtrodden ethnic groups. “The 500 years of Indian resistance have not been in vain,” he proclaimed in his inaugural address. “From 500 years of resistance we pass to another 500 years of power…We are here and we say that we have achieved power to end the injustice, the inequality and oppression that we have lived under.”

Mr Morales’s assumption that his ascent to the presidency would put an end to “Indian resistance” now looks somewhat presumptuous. Since late 2010 a wide range of indigenous groups have held protests against his government for failing to consult sufficiently on infrastructure projects or distribute public spending fairly. Most recently, on August 15th nearly 1,000 people of numerous ethnicities began a 500km (300-mile) march to La Paz, the capital, to oppose the construction of a highway. As the president’s approval rating has tumbled from the high 60s in early 2010 to the mid-40s today, the communities whose interests he claims to represent have been among the first to abandon him.

Mr Morales’s conversion to the cause of indigenous rights is in fact fairly recent. Prior to his 2005 election campaign he was best known as the leader of the coca-leaf growers’ union, and as a socialist who had opposed free-market policies and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises. He adopted the mantle of an ethnic crusader while running for president, which helped attract foreign support for his candidacy and raise money.

In office, Mr Morales has been broadly loyal to the indigenous. In particular, he had the constitution rewritten to grant them group rights, such as guaranteed consultation on government projects affecting them. But implementing those privileges for all 36 of the country’s recognised native communities has proven exceedingly difficult.

The protests have sprouted up all across the country. In the department of Potosí they erupted over the lack of progress in building a promised cement factory and airport, and over a border dispute with a neighbouring department that will affect the distribution of mining revenues. In El Alto, a poor suburb of La Paz, dissent has grown over the delay of the national census until next year. Since migration from rural regions to cities has been high during the past decade, the next census will probably reduce the countryside’s share of central-government financial transfers in favour of urban areas. Mr Morales’s supporters are primarily rural, while many cities—including Santa Cruz, the country’s economic motor in its eastern lowlands—are in the hands of the opposition. That gives the president a strong incentive to postpone the census, angering city-dwellers of all political persuasions. Moreover, since both Potosí and El Alto are highland, majority-indigenous places that have backed Mr Morales in the past, he has not been able to resort to his usual tactic of dismissing the unrest as racially motivated.

The marchers to La Paz are protesting a planned road from Villa Tunari, in the Cochabamba department, to San Ignacio de Moxos in the Beni department. Although governments have discussed building a highway there for two decades, Mr Morales has decided to push ahead. The road’s proponents make strong arguments. Bolivia’s economy has long been undermined by poor infrastructure. Building it could both open up the country’s undeveloped northern savannah region and establish an international trade corridor connecting Brazil’s interior to Pacific ports in northern Chile.

However, the planned route would cut through a national park and protected indigenous area called Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS). Its residents fear that the road will allow coca growers (whose union is still led by Mr Morales) from the neighbouring Chapare province to invade the TIPNIS, cut down forests for lumber, expand their cultivation area and hunt animals for food. Moreover, the government has hired a Brazilian firm for the construction work. Mr Morales did undertake a cursory consultation exercise, as the new constitution requires. But the march’s leaders say the president’s representatives paid mere lip service to their concerns—the same complaint Mr Morales made about many of his predecessors’ development projects. The government has promised to keep the coca growers in line, but it has no capacity to police the remote area effectively.

Mr Morales is holding his ground. He has accused the protesters of being backed by the United States, and one of his top ministers says they are opposing the road in order to stop the government from cracking down on their illegal trafficking in land and lumber. But these charges have only incensed them further, and weakened the president’s hard-won credentials as an advocate of indigenous rights and environmental conservation. Eventually, Mr Morales will probably sit down with the marchers and offer them enough concessions to win their consent. The damage to his political brand, however, will be much harder to reverse.

Source: The Economist (UK)